business practices

Data management is becoming more and more central to the business model of enterprises. The time when data was looked at as little more than the byproduct of automation is long gone, and today we see enterprises vigorously engaged in trying to unlock maximum value from their data, even to the extent of directly monetizing it. Yet, many of these efforts are hampered by immature data governance and management practices stemming from a legacy that did not pay much attention to data. Part of this problem is a failure to understand that there are different types of data, and each type of data has its own special characteristics, challenges and concerns. Reference data is a special type of data. It is essentially codes whose basic job is to turn other data into meaningful business information and to provide an informational context for the wider world in which the enterprise functions.
This paper discusses the challenges associated with implementing a reference data management solution and the essential components of any vision for the governance and management of reference data. It covers the following topics in some detail:
· What is reference data?
· Why is reference data management important?
· What are the challenges of reference data management?
· What are some best practices for the governance and management of reference data?
· What capabilities should you look for in a reference data solution?

To drive strategic insights that lead to competitive advantage, businesses must make the best and smartest use of today’s vast amount of data. To accomplish this, organizations need to apply a collaborative approach to optimizing their data assets. For organizations that seek to evaluate and improve their data management practices, CMMI® Institute has developed the Data Management Maturity (DMM)? model to bridge the perspective gap between business and IT. Download the white paper Why is Measurement of Data Management Maturity Important? to enable you to:
- Empower your executives to make better and faster decisions using a strategic view of their data.
- Achieve the elusive alignment and agreement between the business and IT
- Create a clear path to increasing capabilities

CMMI Institute®’s Data Management Maturity (DMM)SM framework enables organizations to improve data management practices across the full spectrum of their business. It is a unique, comprehensive reference model that provides organizations with a standard set of best practices to assess their capabilities, strengthen their data management program, and develop a custom roadmap for improvements that align with their business goals.

Businesses today recognize the importance of the data they hold, but a general lack of trust in the quality of their data prevents them from achieving strategic business objectives. Nearly half of organizations globally say that a lack of trust in their data contributes to increased risk of non-compliance and regulatory penalties (52%) and a downturn in customer loyalty (51%). To be of value to organizations, data needs to be trustworthy.
In this report, you will read about the findings from this unique study, including:
· How data powers business opportunities
· Why trusted data is essential for performance
· Challenges that affect data quality
· The current state of data management practices
· Upcoming data-related projects in 2017

It is critically important for businesses today to leverage data as a strategic asset, instead of allowing it to become an obstacle. As more and more organizations are trying to make smarter, data-driven decisions, they are discovering that their data management strategy may not be as mature as it needs to be. One major shift we are seeing is the implementation of a Chief Data Officer.
Experian Data Quality recently conducted a research study of more than 250 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Data Officers (CDOs) in the US about their data management practices, and the explosion of the CDO role.
Key insights in the report include:
- Tips for overcoming typical data challenges within your organization
- The changing data management landscape and its affect on the CIO
- The new and growing need for the CDO
- And more!

It’s the moment every IT department dreads: A data loss event takes your business offline and the countdown clock begins. Despite spending countless hours safeguarding against and preparing for this moment, the impact of downtime is immediate and all-consuming.
While IT pros can’t always avoid data loss events, they can prepare for them to ensure minimal downtime. To better
understand the IT experience during a data disaster, EVault commissioned Spiceworks Voice of IT to survey IT pros regarding disaster recovery practices and perceptions. All survey respondents were based in the U.S. and have influence over backup/disaster recovery purchase decisions. This e-book will explore the impact of downtime and data loss on IT departments for small and midsize businesses.

Use of cloud computing by enterprise companiesis growing rapidly. A greater dependence on cloud-based applications means businesses must rethink the level of redundancy of the physical infrastructure
equipment (power, cooling, networking) remaining on-premise, at the “Edge”. In this paper, we describe and critique the common physical infrastructure practices seen today, propose a method of analyzing the resiliency needed, and discuss best practices that will ensure employees remain connected to their business critical applications.

At the highest level of organizations, a new management directive has emerged to meet the changed nature of customer demands and interactions as well as the need to differentiate within the market. This directive has one goal: providing a differentiated customer service experience. As products become increasingly commoditized, organizations can set themselves apart from their competitors by providing a unique customer service experience that creates a "relationship" based on intangible benefits that their customers will find hard to give up. While this vision is theoretically sound, it requires a significant tactical shift in business thinking and processes. The modern customer's habits and service requirements have changed radically. Meeting these needs challenges many historically held beliefs and practices regarding the customer and modes of interaction.

Applications underpin today’s cloud and digital transformation initiatives. As a result, it’s imperative for modern IT organizations to implement a holistic, expert approach to managing applications for maximum performance and optimal business execution.
Read this insights paper from ESG and Riverbed to discover:
How performance management expertise drives critical business outcomes.
Why mature organizations are better equipped to embrace DevOps and other modern IT practices.
What tools, factors, and behaviors correlate to expert performance management practices.

To stay ahead in today's hybrid network, you need a lens into the end user's experience as well as an understanding of the dependencies between your applications and network. With this approach, you are alerted to issues before the business is impacted and problems are resolved faster. This eBook details what you need to know to select a best of breed network performance management solution and outlines the critical capabilities required for deep application visibility across virtualized, hybrid and cloud networks no matter where a user is located. Read this book and:
Discover best practices - for proactive network monitoring and fast troubleshooting
Learn how to stay ahead of application performance issues with increased visibility
Increase productivity and a higher ROI - with automatic discovery, end-to-end monitoring, reporting, analytics and faster MTTR
Ensure your approach is a proactive mode
Study the evaluation checklist - select the best solution for your needs

Chart your course with the latest trends.
Today, staying competitive requires mobile maturity—a maturity that transforms businesses from simply creating products to delivering amazing digital experiences. And mobile is at the center. We’ve analyzed the latest trends from mobile decision makers in the 2017 Adobe Mobile Maturity Study and share the findings in our report, Touching the Infinite.
Read the report to:
Get the latest pulse of mobile marketing and relevant benchmarks for your mobile marketing investment
See how the latest trends and best practices help you acquire and engage your mobile customers
Learn how to transform your strategies around the latest mobile trends and tactics
Simply fill out the form to download the report.

While multinational companies can likely meet some of the GDPR requirements right now, most will find the path to full compliance requires many changes to business-as-usual security practices.
Read this paper to learn how you should be preparing your information security program for compliance with the GDPR. Written for InfoSec leaders, the paper includes:
- A glossary outlining key concepts of the Regulation
- 13 essential steps you should take to help ensure GDPR compliance
- A summary of infosec considerations posed by the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and GDPRD

In our latest Point of View, "The Dirtiest Word In Business," Airfoil has assembled a collective set of best practices to help technology marketers meet the communications challenges of a new digital decade.

When designed well, a data lake is an effective data-driven design pattern for capturing a wide range of data types, both old and new, at large scale. By definition, a data lake is optimized for
the quick ingestion of raw, detailed source data plus on-the-fly processing of such data for exploration, analytics, and operations. Even so, traditional, latent data practices are possible, too.
Organizations are adopting the data lake design pattern (whether on Hadoop or a relational database) because lakes provision the kind of raw data that users need for data exploration and
discovery-oriented forms of advanced analytics. A data lake can also be a consolidation point for both new and traditional data, thereby enabling analytics correlations across all data. With the
right end-user tools, a data lake can enable the self-service data practices that both technical and business users need. These practices wring business value from big data, other new data sources, and burgeoning enterprise da

For data scientists and business analysts who prepare data for analytics, data management technology from SAS acts like a data filter – providing a single platform that lets them access, cleanse, transform and structure data for any analytical purpose. As it
removes the drudgery of routine data preparation, it reveals sparkling clean data and adds value along the way. And that can lead to higher productivity, better decisions and greater agility.
SAS adheres to five data management best practices that support advanced analytics
and deeper insights:
• Simplify access to traditional and emerging data.
• Strengthen the data scientist’s arsenal with advanced analytics techniques.
• Scrub data to build quality into existing processes.
• Shape data using flexible manipulation techniques.
• Share metadata across data management and analytics domains.

Small and midsize retailers around the world are seeing their businesses transform in a variety of ways. These firms, typically with fewer than 1,000 employees, have been transforming themselves as customers seek new types of engagement and as suppliers expect higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness. New business models and new competitors are changing the way retailers do business. Rather than simply react to new threats, successful retailers are leveraging technology in new ways to sharpen business practices, improve agility, and better serve customers while strengthening the role of retailers in the supply chain.
Through digital transformation including the effective engagement of the internet of things (IoT) to track inventory, the opportunity to maintain and gain competitive advantage can be significant.

This report explores the challenges that global businesses face when addressing the complex and fluctuating policy environment and offers a set of best practices that companies can follow to meet evolving privacy and security demands. Download now!

This eBook is for contact center management and business executives looking for ways to increase the efficiency and productivity of their contact center.
• If yours is an existing contact center with infrastructure that has been built up over the years, this eBook provides best practice steps to break down the resulting application silos, unify them, and improve the operational efficiency of your contact center.
• If yours is a new contact center and you have the opportunity to build your infrastructure from the ground up using modern technologies, this eBook will provide best practices to prevent building application silos.

This whitepaper is for contact center management and business executives looking for ways to optimize the business performance of their contact center.
• If yours is an existing contact center with infrastructure that has been built up over the years, this whitepaper provides bestpractice steps to break down the resulting data silos, unify them, and optimize your contact center for business performance.
• If yours is a new contact center and you have the opportunity to build your infrastructure from the ground up using modern technologies, this whitepaper will provide best practices to prevent building data silos.

Video collaboration opens up opportunities for greater interaction and innovation, regardless of industry. Everyone benefits. For example, in healthcare, video is dramatically changing the way institutions interact with customers and professionals. In recent years, a number of hospitals across the United States have been subscribing to video and voice call centers that enable them to share language interpretation services, psychiatric care services and other developing capabilities. In the process, video collaboration is affecting business outcomes, changing business processes and helping healthcare facilities achieve scale, cost and efficiency not seen before.

Build a better midsized business without borders Empower your employees — through business collaboration and communications solutions like video, audio and web collaboration — to help grow revenues, improve customer loyalty, and boost productivity. Learn more in this white paper.

Historically, the speed of a wired connection at the access edge has always been faster than that of a wireless connection. This means workers had to choose between the performance of wired connectivity and the convenience of a wireless connection. Consequently, workers often had to modify the way they worked— first, finding a wired port to use for high-bandwidth applications, such as video or streaming media, and then shifting to wireless connections when the need to be mobile was more important than having the performance of wired.

Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) present systems that are based on common use cases or engineering priorities. CVDs incorporate a broad set of technologies, features, and applications that address customer needs. Cisco engineers have comprehensively tested and documented each design in order to ensure faster, more reliable, and fully predictable deployment.